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This chapter focuses on George Eliot's tangled engagement with the drama. It begins with an analysis of the mutual constitution of theatricalized space and characterological interiority in Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866)—transitional novels in which her emphasis on psychological inwardness works at the expense of demonized crowds. But during this period she also undertook a dramatic work that challenged her most fundamental formal and ethical commitments. Conceived as a play but published as an epic poem mixing dramatic and narrative forms, The Spanish Gypsy shows Eliot refusing both the novel as a form and the inward cultivation it seems designed to encourage. The Spanish Gypsy includes narrative passages that take the grammatical form of free indirect discourse, in which a character's habits of mind are mimicked by the narrator's prose. But the exteriorized perspective demanded by the dramatic origin of The Spanish Gypsy assures that these eminently psychologizing sentences emanate from and attach to no character in particular, instead appearing to echo in an auditorium populated with spectators. Eliot carried this experiment in externalized forms of psychological narration into the novels she wrote next, Middlemarch (1871–72) and especially Daniel Deronda (1876).

This chapter focuses on George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such. It argues that Impressions should not be understood as a full-blown assault on the doctrines of originality and authenticity. Although George Eliot espouses a conception of literary property which shows itself to be antagonistic towards those who claim absolute intellectual monopolies, she does not ‘entirely erase the distinction between Mine and Thine’. Although she criticizes certain aspects of the conception of originality as creatio, she does not entirely debunk its possibility. Impressions contests the topography which locates origination as taking place in the hollow round of the single skull, and suggests instead an Emersonian concept of the author as a highly skilled selector and combiner: an anthologist of language.

In March 1856, a petition was presented in the British Parliament, by Lord Brougham in the Upper House and by Sir Erskine Perry in the Commons. The petition called for property rights for married women, but what is striking is that it was submitted by, and rapidly became associated very closely with, female literary writers. This chapter examines how women writers in Victorian England negotiated the inheritance of a highly gendered model of creativity and intellectual property, focusing on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Unlike William Thackeray and Charles Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot were not publicly involved with the debate about authorship in the 1850s, or with the campaign to improve copyright protection.

This chapter traces the way George Eliot's novels extend the courtship plot to nonmarital sexuality, or what Linnaeus called “clandestine marriage.” It explores how 19th-century natural history and its classificatory energies are employed by Eliot to not only represent versions of courtship anticipated by Linnaeus (yet neglected by novelists) but also to achieve, more broadly, a new kind of realism in which the representation of the social world is achieved through organizing principles derived from natural history.

George Eliot’s most successful characters tend to show a marked disdain for the fluctuations of fashion. Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke, Daniel Deronda: all of these are represented as figures who couldn’t care less about what’s in style at any given moment. This chapter works to understand how the novel as a system is able to produce the effect of stylelessness in the novel and at what cost. It argues, in other words, that in all of Eliot’s novels and especially in Middlemarch, the absence of style is the result not only of rigged comparisons with those who have already fallen into mere stylishness, but also of competitions between differently valued narrative techniques. That is, at exactly the moment when we would expect Middlemarch to be its best, we find it passionately caught up in a game it seemed at first unwilling even to play.

This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.

This chapter explores the problem of elongated artistic forms — forms whose length makes continuous, heightened attention impossible and acts of recollection difficult — by triangulating Richard Wagner's impact upon British musical culture, George Eliot's role in that relation, and the physiological musicology that was the primary language through which Eliot, among other observers, approached Wagnerian opera, and that served to bridge novels like Daniel Deronda (1876), and music drama, as parallel temporal experiences.

This chapter examines the use of Greek heroines such as Medea, Antigone, and Alcestis, and historical figures like Xantippe and Aspasia, to explore feminist issues in the work of George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy. In translations, dramatic monologues and novels, ancient heroines could speak eloquently of the wrongs of women in a way which resonated with Victorian readers. Characters from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, especially Medea, the vengeful victim whose motivation for killing her rival and her own children could be cast in terms of a rebellion against patriarchal society, and Alcestis, the wife who gives up her life for an ungrateful husband, allowed these writers to explore women's anger and violence in a safely distanced context.

This chapter examines the contemporary significance of Middlemarch, a book written by George Eliot. The main focus has been on scientific ideas or research, or medicine in its public aspect. Still in this context, slight but honourable mention should be given to those medical men who have always been appreciative of the connections between medicine and literature, which they see as an aspect of the humane and liberal side of medicine. These connections have long been asserted at a different, more political level, to help substantiate the claim of medicine to join the ranks of the learned professions. In general, some contemporaries found it an oppressive and unnecessary parade of undesirably up-to-date ideas.

While declaring her approval of the Positivist science, George Eliot shows herself to be already pondering on the lessons of history and the relation of the historical stages of progress to the condition and needs of the present. In 1851, she became more closely involved with Positivism through John Chapman, the publisher, and George Lewes, whom she assisted in revising and proofreading his Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences. However, it was not until 1859, when she and Lewes became neighbours and friends of those enthusiastic Comteans Mr. and Mrs. Congreve, that she was drawn into a real involvement with the idea of the new ‘Religion of Humanity’. She was deeply impressed by Auguste Comte's Catéchisme positive. Comte had said that George Eliot's novel Romola should portray the progress of humanity. This chapter deals with Romola's slight but intriguing references to the ideas of Joachim of Fiore.

This chapter discusses The Mill on the Floss and W. R. Bion that both care about sympathy and render it as paramystical and real, as a kind of unconscious communication. It points out fantasies of breaking novelistic, provincial, and subjective frames and reveals wishful thinking as the disavowed basis of George Eliot's theory of social realism. In The Mill on the Floss, books and subjectivities overflow like rivers. The key psychoanalytic interlocutor in the chapter is Bion, whose unconventional ideas fundamentally altered modern psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s, and yet remain opaque to nonspecialists. The chapter also argues that The Mill on the Floss constructs an intersubjective model of mind that helps to shape Bion's later theories of unconscious communication. In turn, Bion's work helps to uncover Eliot's deeper aim in the novel: not necessarily to strengthen social sympathies, but to animate psychic processes in generative, unpredictable ways.